Noirish Project Design Process

Noirish Campaign 

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.   

When actor/writer/director James Devereaux contacted me privately to find out what was the best software to acquire to tag stills from his debut feature Noirish Project as “a bit of fun”, I was pretty up front that I thought his work was better than for him to just tag the odd photo with a snippet of type as a promo. I talked to him about the idea of letting me work on a full campaign for the film and he liked the idea so, after a little while, I volunteered my services and was ‘in’.

Now as a graphic designer for over 20 years, my normal approach to doing something like this would be to ask James a lot of questions regarding details about the film and maybe badger him to see the script... and that’s what I almost got into with him. But something held me back. I remembered a couple of things which made me think that, maybe for this one project, the results I produced might be better off if I went in a little more blind on this one. I know, for example, that James welcomes improvisation and the opportunity for serendipity in his work... so a locked in script might be only a guide as to what really gets up on the screen in the final cut of the movie anyway. Added to that was the fact that the window between completion of the final version and the release probably wouldn’t have been enough time for me to come up with anything useful anyway... not with my regular day job hogging all my time and with film reviews to write most evenings.

Also, I know that some of the best campaigns, especially from one of my design heroes in the fifties and sixties, were much more effective by not selling the actual content of the film but by selling the “idea” of the event and attraction of the film. This was something I wanted to try but, keeping with James’ idea that whatever I did, it had to be fun for me to do (a work ethic I gather he instills, or at least expects, from all his collaborators), I also suggested something which, frankly, meant a lot more work for me but which I thought would be ultimately more rewarding for the audience, for James and for myself.

So I suggested that I made not one but three campaigns for the movie... campaigns that would be, like Billy Pilgrim, the main protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time.” With this in mind I suggested I work on the following...

1. A set of black and white (as the movie is shot in monochrome) lobby cards in the style of something you might see in the UK in the 70s and then topped off with a colour, 1970s style montage poster.

2. A set of Italian fotobusta, in the style of something from the 1950s/60s with bright, hand coloured looking shots combined in a dynamic layout and then followed up with a locandina of some sort.

3. A modern character teaser campaign depicting primary characters and followed by a poster or two as the film might be advertised today (which is fair enough, it is after all, a contemporary film). This actually ended up as two sets but I’ll get to that later.

4.  I also threw in some quick teasers which were not aligned to the other campaigns as a fast response to some other things James was doing, but I won’t cover those here.

James liked the idea so I ran with it quick, before he changed his mind. I asked him for the credits, the four main character names, and a choice of quotes from the movie that each character says so I could build the character teasers around the phrases... as well as loads of high resolution stills from the shoots. As many as he could get me.  But first things first, the project needed a logo...


The Logo
Saul Bass is my design hero so I asked myself what Saul would have done for this.

James produced the first of what ended up as two short ‘preludes’ to his film and, like a few of his other shorts, I noticed the prominence of a phone conversation as a catalyst to get things moving. Everything always starts with a phone call so I figured I would use that as an icon to encapsulate that everything in the narrative has that starting point. I knew (or hope I know) that James will be screening both of his preludes with the main feature, so it kinda made sense. I came up with something very fifties and Saul-like and which, despite appearances, gave me a few problems to wrestle with but eventually got to something which looked defined enough and didn’t camouflage itself in various coloured backgrounds too badly.


The 70s Campaign
The lobby cards were the easy bit, once I’d discovered the more common sizes and ratios used. In the end, for the sake of memory size and storage space, the final poster was just done as an A size to make printing easier, if that’s required... but the lobby cards and fotobusta are all in the correct aspect ratios.

The lobby cards are just the black and white stills where I’ve fiddled about with the levels and contrasts etc and then just applied into a template. Pretty much as the ones I was looking at when I was researching these things.

The poster was a montage of elements I’d cut out from the stills... which I then heavily filtered the f**** out of to make it resemble one of those very impressionistic poster artworks you would sometimes see back then. I remembered as a kid realising that some of the people in the backgrounds of these posters were just a head and an odd squiggle for a feature or two and that’s the kind of distancing I was going for with what I did here.


Fotobustas and Locandina
This is where I really had fun. My initial mock up visual to James was something where I’d converted the colour still he gave me to a black and white image, removed all the white and then coloured up the background layers with a paintbrush tool behind the blacks of the main image. It was okay and James liked it but I wasn’t completely satisfied with it so I tried to do something else. I experimented and in the end came up with something which gave me just the look I was trying so hard to match for this kind of material.

What I did in the end was take each shot and make a duplicate version of it on two separate layers. The bottom layer retained the colour and I increased the saturation to absolutely outrageous levels, something which would make anyone looking at it recoil at the vibrance of it but not to the extent that the original hues were completely lost (although definitely getting near that territory, for sure). This was then covered with a top layer of the shot in exactly the same place, which I then turned into a mono image. Then I played around with the levels a little bit before posterising the mono image to just two channels... like a sixties photographer might do for a screen print. This meant that all the whites to mid greys and just above were turned into white space, and all the mid to dark greys and above were turned into black. So far so good...

Then I started playing with the opacity of the top layer and quickly saw my idea had worked. The oversaturated colours from the layer below shone through the white in a muted state which brought them down to something which mirrored the real, brightly hand coloured locandina of the 50s and 60s very well. The bonus, of course, was that the dark areas over the blacks already in the bottom layer were also magnified, but in the other direction... they became darker in certain tonal areas and helped define the shapes of the people in the photos even more.

This all looked pretty "dead on" to me and, after redesigning the logo into an Italian version with a longer top leading in, I created a template I could drop the flattened versions of these new “alternate” shots into and was very pleased with the results.

For the locandina, I tried to pick elements which I thought the Italians would use to sell the film in their own country. These would not necessarily be important elements of the film, of course... just the bits they would expect their target audience to latch on to. I used a similar (although not quite the same) process as the earlier seventies poster to assemble the final locandina and was pretty pleased with this one.


The Modern Campaign
For the modern campaign I used isolated shots of the characters and played around with colour level saturation before sharpening up the shot and just posterising certain parts of the features. I wanted something stark but colourful and I then used the phrases I chose from the ones I’d been given and cut them up into little chunks to emphasise them and make them something more as isolated features than they would probably be when experienced as lines in the main film. This was okay though, that’s what advertising is all about... trickery and persuasion.

I wanted a background that was colourful, ragged and textural to contrast the things going over the top of it. In the end I took a shot of the palm of my hand and did all kinds of things to it (including multilayering in different positions) to get to the state you see in the teasers and final posters. I really liked what I achieved here. I also did versions where the actual characters were in mono and, since neither James or myself could figure out which ones we liked best, we used both as the US and UK equivalents of the same campaign (I’m pretty sure I’ve actually seen this done before but can’t remember which films did this with the colour in the US version and the black and white in the UK versions).

The final posters were an amalgamation of the four character posters and the added element of Alfie holding his sign. I did both portrait and landscape versions and got something I was pleased with in the end. I used the elements from this campaign when James asked me to come up with some opening title cards for the film... but I pushed them all in a slightly different way because of their context.

And that’s an insight, as James has asked, into my approach for the multiple campaigns for Noirish Project. Now, like you, I’m just waiting to see what he came up with in his final movie... so no pressure James!

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)

Ain’t Miss Be Slaving?

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)
1969 Italy/West Germany
Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile
Earls Court Collection DVD Region 0

Right. I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews, I’m afraid.

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina) is a film of which I’d never heard of until a stall holder at a major London Film Convention recommended it to me. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of those films where the music has haunted me for quite a while now.

When I got the movie home I noticed a quite striking and what I would say is a fairly historically iconic visual image on the back cover of the front of a woman’s head projecting from a flat surface (actually a hole cut in a mirror, in the film proper). This is one of the more interesting shots from early on in this movie (although the more famous version is obviously a publicity shot) and I recognised it immediately as being the cover image for a current “best of” album for Ennio Morricone’s famous singer Edda Dell’Orso. It's also used these days as the cover of the soundtrack album. The compilation it's used on is actually called Edda Dell’Orso “Voice” and it contains a number of tracks by Morricone and other composers, including Piero Piccioni who scored this film. Check To The Queen is represented by no less than three tracks on that particular compilation. And I immediately knew from this that I was probably familiar with a lot of the music in this film already, since I have a number of Italian movie music compilations and, yeah, this film seems to get picked on a lot for those kinds of albums... and rightly so.

So, before I’d even got around to watching the movie, I put a request in to my major supplier of Italian scores and he sorted me out the expanded edition of the soundtrack, when I saw him at another film fair. I was advised that the score on this one was “really good” and, after having listened to the album a few times... I’d have to agree with that conclusion. It was also, obviously, very familiar.

But what’s the film like.

Well, there’s hardly any story and it’s the tale of a BDSM ‘D/s’ relationship between a Countess, Sylvia, who goes to work as one of the slaves of a famous film actress, Margaret. She goes there because she has strange and psychedelically lit fantasies of being whipped and humiliated by the lady in question and, once she accepts the ‘position’ given to her, most of her desires come true.

It’s fairly far ahead in terms of it’s time and the content being explored in a commercial venue such as cinema. Various forms of objectification play are indulged by the mistress before Sylvia starts to go along a path of almost topping from the bottom (in modern parlance) and as a result is auctioned off in a non-binding but ultimately worrying auction due to the tone of the film depicting the mindset of a submissive in such situations as suffering a form of mental illness which needs to be cured. Not the domination part, mind, just the submissive. I guess it was either a censorship issue or a bit of naivete at the time that any discussion of mental health rears its head at all in terms of this kind of relationship or lifestyle choice. Certain aspects of it wouldn’t be for all people in that kind of scene, I know, but it’s wrong not to be vocal about the lack of right one person or body of people has to question another person's sexual or power triggers and so forth, in that ‘closed to the general public’ lack of freedom. I thought the sixties were supposed to be a little more liberated than that. I always was, growing up in the late 60s to late 70s.

Of course, we’re not living in that kind of situation these days... oh wait... checks the clock and state of the British government and politics... oh no, the times we’re living in are much worse under a series of judgmental ruling parties who think that they know best. Thankfully, the modern BDSM community seems less judgmental about such relationships than the majority of governments... so there’s still hope that people are allowed to have any kind of Safe, Sane and Consensual relationship they want... for now.

So okay, sexual politics and power games out of the way... the film is shot really nicely. The psychedelic fantasy sequences I mentioned are heavy on the filters (to the point where some of the action is obscured or uncomfortable to look at) and there are some nice shot set ups which utilise the overemphasised vertical shapes of the mansion house in which nearly all of the movie is set. There’s a nice scene where Margaret rides a mechanical white horse (not dissimilar to the one in Korda’s The Thief Of Baghdad) which leads to some pony play fantasies in Sylvia’s head and there’s even some living statue play... Yeah. Whatever. I’m with Hot Fuzz on this one... the blight of the living statue.

And, of course, there’s Piccioni’s wonderful lounge score with Edda Dell’Orso’s amazing voice coming at you... you’re probably familiar with her from a load of Italian scores already such as A Fistful Of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In The West and she is just as spellbinding working with Piccioni here as she is with some of the other famous composers she’s collaborated with in the past. Any film scored using her incredible vocal talents is going to elevate itself and the score glues everything together in this movie and makes it work. Even stops it becoming boring at times, which it threatens to do on a few occasions... like I said, not much happens.

I don’t think I’d recommend this film to many people, even less so to those who I know who are in the BDSM scene and who, like me, might become just a little enraged at the lack of intelligence and conscience applied to the subject matter in this particular area... which is pretty much what the movie is all about. On the other hand, the movie has some spectacular shots, competent editing, beautiful naked women and a truly classic lounge score which is obviously, due to its prominence on various compilation selections, considered very highly in the industry. So if you’re into all that stuff... yeah, give it a go.

Mystics In Bali (Leák)

Bali Sugar

Mystics In Bali (Leák)
1981 Indonesia
Directed by H. Tjut Djalil
Mondo Macabro DVD Region 0

Warning: Seriously, if this review didn’t have spoilers here you probably wouldn’t be interested in seeing the movie. You need to know this kind of stuff exists.

A leák (or leyak) is a powerful Balinese shape-changing spirit demon, from what I can make out. Often they will take the form of pig spirits or flying balls of fire (as happens in a couple of scenes in this movie) and they prey on blood, especially the blood of new born, in a vampiric way. So... in summary... a powerful, vampiric, black magic demon of some description.

I don’t actually think I’d heard of a leák before watching this movie as, I think, my only other encounter with the films of Indonesia was the female biker/prison movie Virgins From Hell. My interest in tracking down this title came from a trailer excerpt I’d seen on two other Mondo Macabro releases, Countess Perverse (reviewed here) and Gravida (reviewed here) What I saw in this trailer excerpt, or what I thought I saw, was a woman’s head and spinal column detaching from her body and then floating off to deliver cunnilingus to a woman somewhere else. However, as it turns out, from the way the trailer was cut and the way I interpreted the juxtaposition of the visuals... what happens in the movie itself is even a little more warped than that. I’ll get to that soon.

Okay, so, with flying heads and lightning shooting out of levitating people’s hands, I figured I really couldn’t miss out on this movie and I finally ordered one of the remaining copies from US Amazon.

Now Mondo Macabro are a label I like and support a lot (seriously, who else would try to get a release for stuff like this) and they present the film here in a mostly crisp print (apart from some of the special effects transition scenes, probably because of the way the stock was originally treated for the FX... seen that kind of thing before) in a nice 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer. About my only real grumble is that the movie is dubbed in this instance, which I was a bit annoyed about. Surely it would have been cheaper to carry the original Indonesian soundtrack and put some subtitles over the top?

Anyway, that quibble aside, I have to say that for me, as someone who likes to have “adventures in cinema”, I was truly pleased to be able to see this one. It’s quite terrible and unintentionally funny pretty much throughout... but it also has a certain charm of it’s own and some nice little make up effects.

The credits sequence is amazing and transports you to a place where a masked leák is dancing around for you, followed by shots of various different and interesting demonic masks being jangled about the screen in front of you while exciting and, in some ways, unbearable music is played at you. It reminded me of something from Live And Let Die (reviewed here) in that respect. The credits also include that OMFG moment when you discover this stuff is actually based on someone’s novel. Seriously, there was a source novel? With flying heads?

Okay, so the film starts off pretty well where the main male and female protagonists, who don’t seem to be very good actors (in fact, the leading lady was apparently a German tourist who did it for a few weeks added on to her holiday for free), meet and we are “expositioned” to death about the girls book she’s writing on voodoo and black magic and her wish to study under the apprenticeship of a leák. Our main man, who is a complete good guy and therefore completely familiar with the concept that you should not go messing with evil spirits (we later find out), contradicts his character completely and offers to hook her up with one.

There’s some interesting and not uncreative framing throughout the movie... especially in the non-effects sequences like this. There’s a beautifully wild transition where we are following the conversation between these two people, walking towards camera through an arch, where we suddenly pan up to an integral set of carvings on the arch culminating with a demonic gargoyle amidst an explosion of wild music, which continues playing through the next scene as source music. This is all good stuff.

Another tactic the director seems to use in the quieter scenes is to remove the camera from the main action to focus on establishing the location within the same shot. For example, a conversation taking place carries on in the soundtrack while the camera pans away and around the surroundings before eventually cutting back to the people having the conversation, now having placed them in the environment. It’s an interesting way of doing things and something I rarely see done outside European cinema (except for maybe in some of the films of Woody Allen or Martin Scorcese).

When the two meet the leák for the first time, we are introduced to her incessant, cackling laughter which seems to be her trademark. It’s seriously persistent and makes Cesar Romero’s turn as The Joker in the 60s Batman TV show seem positively sombre. She also shows her sense of humour when offering to shake hands with Catherine (our foolish and mostly wooden heroine) in the traditional American way... but leaving here arm behind in Catherine’s hand when she leaves... it crawls off on its own later.

This is all good stuff of course and she agrees to take on Catherine as her disciple for “payment”... which, of course, Catherine never bothers to ask about. The deal is sealed the next evening when Cathering brings the leák jewels and several bottles of blood to drink... although where she got the bottles of blood from is anyone’s guess. The leák is pretty much unseen, hiding in the bushes, for this sequence but she asks Catherine to remove her skirt so her extra long tongue can lick her inner thigh and tattoo a demon symbol on it with what I can only describe as, her electrified taste buds. Don’t worry... it sounds much better than it actually is. Most of the special effects are more than a little ropey, it has to be said, although the leák’s long nails in certain scenes are marvellous and put me in mind of early German Expressionism cinema and, also, the annhilants (Walking Bombs) from Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe.

The next night, Catherine is back and trying to copy the demon ladies laugh in a scene so prolonged and stupid that I even had time to think of that Cesar Romero crack I hit you with a couple of paragraphs ago. But, sad to say, being a demon woman’s disciple is not all it’s cracked up to be and Catherine doesn’t really remember the times the leák takes over her head. And I mean literally...

We come to the first of a few occurrences of what I’d seen on the trailer. Catherine’s head and bloody spinal column rip from her body under the spell of the leák and fly at high speed to visit a pregnant lady and suck at her vagina... not for the joy of f*cked up voodoo sex as I’d naively imagined from the trailer, but in order to suck out and consume the baby in the mother’s womb before it’s born. Nice people these leák!

And I know Catherine is not really herself after these little kinds of jaunts because she doesn’t really understand the after effects when she awakens the next day. For example, after spending her night as a giant snake, she goes to kiss her new sweetheart but instead runs to vomit green bile and three live mice. Obviously her snake self hadn’t got around to digesting these poor little guys yet but, regardless of the fact that there are live mice jumping out of her throat, Catherine proves her general naivete by assuming she must have eaten something that disagreed with her at a banquet the night before.

A further example of how being an apprentice to the dark arts can increase your stupidity ten fold occurs when she awakens one morning to find blood dripping from her mouth. She concludes that the events of the night before must have been a dream and that she seems to have bitten her lip. Blimey. Well maybe she was into some lip biting the night before but, if she was, they certainly weren’t her lips! Stupid, stupid girl!

Meanwhile, the cavalry, in the form of Catherine’s new lover, his uncle, and various other people who work for the forces of light... a team of “leák-busters” in fact, totally fail in some of their intents but rush in anyway for the final half hour to do battle with the leák and Catherine in a scene which includes an almost but not quite good re-assembling pig transformation, bad levitation effects, cartoon lightning forces, cartoon flames and a few bloody incidents. It’s not a great climax to the movie (which has the most abrupt, non-informative, lack of closure ending I’ve seen in a long time) but the film is what it is and I am, I have to say, happy to have seen it.

This film, as I’m sure you may have guessed by now, isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea and, I can’t in all honesty, say it was even any good. But it was entertaining and if, like myself, you are on a mission to seek out different cinematic experiences from around the world, you may just appreciate this film even from the scene where, after the heroes have seen Catherines head flying around and attempt to get back into her body, one of the characters comes to the calmly and wildly inappropriately delivered conclusion that... “Maybe Catherine’s being used by supernatural forces.” Oh yeah. Gee. Ya think?

Honestly, if you are into preposterous movies, then Mystics In Bali should probably be on your “see this rubbish before you die” list. It’s not pretty but it is notable, for many dubious reasons. Proceed with caution followed by a contradictory air of wild abandon.

The Lone Ranger

Hard Mask-Tasker

The Lone Ranger
2012 USA
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Playing at UK cinemas now.

The Lone Ranger started out his life in a radio series in 1933. He then rode into novels and a couple of serials (now sadly lost, at least in their original serial format) and then the famous Clayton Moore TV show... followed by a few mis-fires of movies along the way. The latest mis-fire of a movie is by Gore Verbinski and it’s simply called... The Lone Ranger.

I wasn’t the biggest Lone Ranger fan as a kid, but I did quite like watching episodes of that old Clayton Moore show and I also had those brilliant Lone Ranger action men which weren’t quite as big as a regular action man but were certainly about 10 inches tall. They even had a flexible grip on them to hold their six shooters if memory serves me correctly. For the record, I had the three basic figures they released... The Lone Ranger, Tonto and Bush Cavendish. I didn’t have Silver... that would have been too extravagant. Bush Cavendish was, of course, modelled after the actor who played him in multiple episodes in the TV show, Glenn Strange, who had played the Frankenstein monster for Universal three times in House Of Frankenstein, House Of Dracula and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I didn’t know that as a kid though and I was probably unlikely to make the connection... my Frankenstein monster action figure was firmly modelled on the Karloff portrayal so there was really no resemblance between that and my Butch Cavendish toy.

Most people seem to forget the lineage of The Lone Ranger character in terms of his relationship with another radio, film and TV sensation who was created by the same writers... The Green Hornet. Because of rights issues with various companies exploiting the two properties, it’s rarely if ever referenced except on the Radio shows but The Lone Ranger’s secret identity is John Reid and he is the great uncle of Britt Reid. It’s the silver mine that The Lone Ranger uses to make his silver bullets from that ensures the wealth of Britt Reid’s family in The Green Hornet but, like I said, it’s more of a family secret now due to legal obstructions.

Now I’m not the biggest Gore Verbinski fan, I have to say. I loved the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie but that was about it. I think they all went downhill from there and you can see how unmoved I was by Rango right here. The Lone Ranger is a film that has had really bad word of mouth and is being hailed as this year’s John Carter in terms of the capacity to lose money... although I have to say that, asides from a few problems I had with the writing of the titular character in John Carter and the penchant to give a rational scientific spin to the supernatural aspect of the main protagonist finding himself a stranger in a strange land, I actually thought quite a lot of that particular movie. So I wasn’t completely convinced by the bad word of mouth on The Lone Ranger and just see it as a symptom of the lack of willingness in modern audiences to embrace the old fashioned pulp heroes that I love. So I went in with a fairly open mind I have to say and the early signs, once the film began to play out the first few scenes, were encouraging.

Yeah, that’s right. The new version of The Lone Ranger has a perfect set up. An unexpected time period setting with an elderly Tonto to relate the story of the film to a young masked boy in a cowboy suit, followed by the collision of the two main characters in a heady action sequence which immediately brings their chemistry out and makes for some thrilling and humorous watching. Unfortunately, and quite surprisingly after this strong an opening, I have to say, the film begins to falter and spiral down the more it plays out after this initial set up.

It doesn’t immediately fizzle and the characters are written and played with a certain amount of wit, which certainly keeps things bobbing along (just to confirm, Johnny Depp is excellent as always), it just doesn’t really seem to pick up the pace for any great length of time as things continue and there’s very little action to speak of in the rest of the movie until you get to the end sequence. It doesn’t get boring exactly... it just gets, kinda, less than it could have been as opposed to ones expectations... or mine at any rate. Which is a shame, really. I think a few more action scenes, or at least extensions to the smattering of “almost but not quite going for it” action throughout the rest of the movie (up until the end sequence, which it gets back to its hell bent for leather pacing) would have served to punctuate the movie with more emotional investment in the characters and might have made it a great film.

As it is, it doesn’t quite make good, let alone great. And that’s not what I was hoping to be writing today.

On the other hand, it is full of some great things. Armie Hammer’s portrayal of the title character is, perhaps, written a little too pure for an adult but he does it well and Depp has a ball with Tonto and, helpfully, the two actors bounce off each other well. Ditto to William Fichtner’s turn as a rather more disturbing Butch Cavendish than I remember and more shout outs for Tom Wilkinson and Helena Bonham Carter, who is maybe a bit larger than life in the role of the madam of a brothel but certainly fits the mood and shines whenever her and her “special leg” are on screen. Extra special praise to Ruth Wilson as Rebecca Reid, who actually manages to add a real touch of down-to-earth emotion to her character in direct contrast to the hammy but enjoyable theatrics around her, without clashing with the style of the picture. I was really impressed with her in this and next to Johnny Depp, she was the best thing in it.

At least in acting terms. The rolling western scenery and beautiful cinematography also get a big hug from me. Many references to locations used by Sergio Leone (which I’m sure were probably all postmodern references to John Ford anyway) are included which provide the... “that was where Harmonica in Once Upon A Time In The West was made to...” moments in the movie. There are a fair few of these.

The score is fantastic in many ways, too. I find Zimmer a bit hit and miss still but I have preferred his last five years or so to most anything in his earlier back catalogue. I did get annoyed at the obvious references to the Leone film I just mentioned, though. In the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie there’s a cue called Parlay, and it’s a dead rip off in structure and orchestration to The Grand Massacre scene from Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West score... well there’s nothing quite so drastic in The Lone Ranger but there is certainly a lot of music which takes its tone from this cue and it did keep popping me out of the movie at frequent intervals, I have to say. However, it’s a great score and though Zimmer hits you with The Lone Ranger’s key signature music, The William Tell Overture by Rossini, which has been accompanying the character in most of his adventures starting with his original radio appearances, he only plays it for a minute or two near the start of the movie. What he does is cleverly hold back on galloping into the full overture until the spectacular end action sequence, where he plays it to death and throws his own variations in on it too in a stunning, musical tour de force which should make the hair of most fans of this well worn character stand on end.

What the music can’t do, unfortunately, is make the final train chase sequence make more sense when it’s all edited together. I just got lost very quickly and found it harder to follow than I was comfortable with. I think it’s because the sequence is a little more complex than usual as opposed to bad editing. Which is a shame because the music really whipped up the mood for this final hoorah of the movie.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say at this stage, I think. The Lone Ranger is not a terrible movie and I liked bits of it so much that I’ll probably grab the BluRay of this when it hits the sales for a repeat watch. If you are into westerns, and this character especially, then you will probably want to see this take on it. It brings some nice originality to certain parts of “the legend” that are interesting tweaks.

If you’re going for Johnny Depp... he, too, is a good reason to see this. His turn as the older version of Tonto was so good it took me a while to even work out it was him... although the younger version of him seen in the majority of the movie is definitely easy to spot as Depp and, dare I say it, there are definitely some sly nods to his Jack Sparrow persona in a couple of sequences.

If, on the other hand, you’re not a fan of westerns and don’t know your Lone Ranger from... well... from your Green Hornet, then this is probably not going to be a good movie for you. It does lack a certain oomph in some places and even with some decidedly vicious, cannibalistic bunnies and a certain uneasy lack of balance about whether it’s trying to be a family film or something more horrific, it probably won’t do much for you. A sequel might be a nice idea but I suspect it stands little chance of getting one now. Oh well. Hey ho, Silver.

The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury

Killer Serials

The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury
by Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut
Woburn Press
ISBN: 071300097X

When I find a bargain of a second hand book I’m not usually accustomed to paying a tenner for it. But I could tell from the image of Jean Rogers as Dale Arden peering at me from the spine on the shelf, about a year ago, that this one was something special and “of its time”. And that time, according to this first edition (of probably only one pressing I’m guessing, from its rarity), published in Great Britain by Woburn Books... was 1973. And therein lies both the deep joy and slight weakness, in contemporary terms, of this particular volume.

Next to the £10 marked up price, written in pencil on the first interior page, there is also an ink penned inscription written, presumably, by the previous owner of this adventuresome tome. Christmas 1973, is what it reads and I wonder if, perhaps, this book was sold on as a result of the death of the last reader. Whoever he or she was, I’d have to say to any ghostly, lingering spirit of that person, their Christmas present came to find itself in good hands again. Re-bought by someone who will value and cherish it for what it is. Even its imperfections.

When I was a young un, my mum and dad would take me to the local library in what was then known as Lower Edmonton but is now, more politically correctly called, Edmonton Green. My dad would sometimes take me up to the reference library and sit with me so we could flick through books with pictures in and he could describe to me, with their aid, all of the science fiction and fantasy films of bygone decades that I’d never seen and probably never would, unless one of the television channels decided to show one some time. Don’t forget, this is in the time before home video was even a wink in the consumer’s eye and movies were rarely shown more than once every three years or so (if the channel happened to have the rights to show it at the time). We had a small black and white television set with, in those days, three channels (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) and that was as good as it got.

Many an hour was spent looking at the pictures in these books of B-movie monsters and robots of whom my dad would tell me stories from his personal experiences of watching them cavort and cut a path of celluloid destruction on the silver screen. Now I have most of these things on DVD I suspect but then, the unobtainable nature and the secret knowledge gained from the wisdom of books with the black and white photographic stills of these things was a very special thing and it was the way me and my father bonded (this is the same library from which my father borrowed a long playing record of the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds... but that’s another story). I’m pretty sure that one of the books we used to look through was this one I’m reviewing here. It only has two small runs of black and white photos in it near the centre but that would have been enough for my father to show me images from the Flash Gordon, Batman and Superman serials etc. This was the stuff of legends but it was a reference library so these books weren’t really things we could take home with us and read. And once my mum had done with obliterating the Agatha Christie shelves in the downstairs library, it was usually time to go home.

1973 was a good year for me. Or it might have been 1974 actually. Can’t quite recall the year but I was five or six years old... and the BBC did something wonderful (asides from showing the original King Kong late one night which was... oh wait... that really is another story). Anyway, the BBC had a special afternoon on, probably BBC2 actually, of something they were showing to see if it would be popular. They were showing the original 1936 serial of Flash Gordon squashed together with the episode tops and tails taken out and split into two big parts, sandwiching a Hoppalong Cassidy movie in the middle. This turned out to be my equivalent of heaven and my father and I watched every drop. I was instantly a Flash Gordon fan.

The serials must have proved popular for the BBC I guess, or at least were cheaply obtained, because for the next ten years or so after that, they started showing the actual serial episode versions of this and other good serials at regular time slots. At first they would be shown during the Christmas holidays, then they would move to every weeknight at a 5.40pm time slot (followed by either a Charlie Chan, Saint or Falcon movie) and also during the summer and Easter holidays in the mornings, right after the French TV serial The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe and before Why Don’t You? I watched them all and, when they were on in the evenings (pre video recorders, remember?) my dad would watch them with me. We would watch Flash Gordon, carry on with him on Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, watch him victorious in Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, and then watch as Buster Crabbe would change his hair colour for Buck Rogers. Then we would thrill to King Of The Rocket Men, Hawk Of The Wilderness and Daredevils Of The Red Circle. Those were the days.

This book remembers all of these too but, it has to be said, not as vividly. That’s because, as the authors say in the book, a lot of these serials just couldn’t be seen to be reviewed. What could be gleaned mostly came from childhood memories, American television showings, interviews with some of the major players and readings of the original scripts. So that’s one thing... because I live in a time where I have a lot of these serials (commercially available or from other sources) I actually am able to see the things being reviewed, in some cases, when the writers (at the time) might not have had a chance to see some of them at all.

And like I said, the book is of its time.

Because these things weren’t easy to see, a lot of the book, more than a book dealing with the same subject matter would do today, it taken up with almost blow by blow accounts of what happened in a particular serial. Which is interesting and still, in some cases, quite valuable in a way but, even so, the talk about various tropes or quirks of these startling chapter plays is buried under the descriptions of the episodes themselves. Which in 1973 must have been fantastic (I wish I’d had this book as a kid) but nowadays can drag a bit when the serial being described is something you only watched a few years back.

Still, that’s not to detract from just how good a book it is and, more importantly, just how enthusiastic the two writers are (George Lucas must have thought so too because I seem to remember that Donald F. Glut was the guy who wrote the commercially released novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980... which is pretty much as close to a modern cinema serial you’re going to get). You will want to watch all these serials again, once you read about them, which is a shame because some of them really are still lost to time, never to be seen again. Okay, so maybe I live more in hope now that I live in an era which has managed to restore to us a complete print of Metropolis (reviewed here) but I suspect a lot less effort would be made these days to locate an old Lone Ranger serial as opposed to a masterwork of early German Expressionism. But still... I can live in hope.

The thing is, though, I could disagree quite violently with the authors opinions on some serials... but I don’t know if they’ve actually seen them or not. They make a point about just how bad the two Batman serials were but actually, I’d like to go on record saying that, although I agree with their appraisal of Batman and Robin from 1949, I actually really enjoyed the original Batman serial from 1943. That was a class act (in serial terms) and I don’t care who knows about it. There’s also the fact, and the authors warn you about this up front, to be fair, that the book deals almost exclusively with the talkies and the silent era serials are mostly left unexplored in any great detail.

That being said, its also a book that holds great treasures and is certainly a thing of value and wonder. For instance, among the many footnotes in the book, I came across this little gem...

“Comic relief characters were very much a part of serials of the talkie era. Syd Saylor’s particular trademark was the manipulation of his bow tie due to a large and manoeuvrable Adam’s apple.”

Now come on... that’s something you don’t read in books that often these days, is it? I showed that passage to my dad and he said... “You know... I think I remember him and that act.” It doesn’t get any better than this.

There’s also a little insight into stuff like the way actors in serials were cast due to their resemblance to the various companies’ main stunt men and if one or two of them had a checkered history, it’s touched upon here, if you can sort out the wheat from the chaff. It’s always interesting to know which A-listers died in the war or which matinee idol went to prison for 40 years after murdering someone. All good knowledge to be in possession of... hidden in among the jokes and asides about topical issues like the comments levelled at the then Governor Ronald Reagan. If only they’d known!

At a basic level, though, this is what you need to know if you decide you want to make an investment in purchasing what is now a harder to obtain and considerably more expensive item than what I payed out for it last year, according to Amazon. If you are after a book that covers the stylistic traits of these serials and looks at how they came into being and evolved during their “relatively” short cinematic lifetime, then this book may be less than what you are looking for. Some of this stuff is covered, for sure, but not in any academic detail, it has to be said. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something which, for it’s day, was probably the most knowledgable god-send of a book and is something written with a real enthusiasm and love of the genre, then you could do a lot worse than read this joyous celebration of a slice of cinematic history that a lot of the younger kiddies seem to have forgotten about (or not had the opportunity to see) these days. If you’re a true fan of these old action adventure romps with cliffhanger endings and, quite often, cheated or ludicrous solutions to those cliffhangers at the opening of the next episode, then this book is surely written for you.

Don't Bother To Knock

Knock Around The Clock

Don’t Bother To Knock
1952 USA
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Warning: There are a few spoilers here, but I... 
don’t bother to... give away the ending.

Don’t Bother To Knock is a movie I hadn’t seen for a very long time. Not for at least thirty years, in fact, since I was a teen and was obsessed by Marilyn Monroe... not so much for being a great actress (I haven’t seen a great deal of her movies, to be truthful) but as much for the way her imagery was used and exploited as a powerful female icon to many generations (a practice that still remains today). If she’d been allowed to grow old and die a natural death she would, I fear, be nowhere as famous as she is today. Instead, her “brand image” has gone on to inspire and sadden people even now, as much as her acting performances are there to be enjoyed and admired in the modern, home viewing era.

Out of the movies I’ve seen her in, where she’s usually playing flirty, comical roles, this film is among my top three favourite Marilyn performances, along with Niagara and Bus Stop... although don’t ask me where in that top three this one comes because I’ve really not thought about it that much.

This was one of her early films, only five years into her career while she was still finding her feet and the studio really didn’t know what they were doing with her. It’s also, apparently, her first straight dramatic role, I’m informed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the incredible performance she pulls off in this movie is what directly led to her being cast as the “femme fatale” in Niagara, a year later (and reviewed here).

Shot in black and white, Don’t Bother To Knock is one of those rare films, like High Noon and Before Sunset, which is actually set in real time. That is to say, time passes for the audience at exactly the same rate as the events that take place on the screen and, although the approach to the movie in terms of music and snappy dialogue starts off all bright and breezy with the young Ann Bancroft, making her movie debut as Lyn Lesley, singing old musical numbers in the hotel which provides the setting for the whole story... it’s not long before a decidedly dark tone sets into the piece when we meet our main male protagonist Jed Towers, played by the always reliable Richard Widmark.

Lyn has sent Jed a letter telling him that they are “over”! Naturally, this encourages Jed, an airline pilot, to get a room at the hotel and pester Lyn between songs from her floor show to find out where he went wrong and if there’s any hope of reconciliation. Lyn wants him there but she rejects him again (I’ll never understand the female mind) and he gets naturally frustrated and demonstrative. I don’t blame him when she comes out with confusing statements like... “I’m not angry... I’m just furious.” She said what now?

Even the bar tender, who wants to see Lyn happy, has words of wisdom for Jed when it comes to commitment and caring (which is kinda, I think, where Lyn is going with her psychological shenanigans), and it’s just another example of some great, crisp dialogue moments the movie has. When Jed and he get talking on the subject of “wives” he unleashes this little gem at Jed...

JED: “Get married and you become a statistic.”
BARTENDER: “Stay single and you end up talking to bartenders!”

Meanwhile, the main plot has turned up in the form of Marilyn Monroe playing Nell (originally Munro in the source novel on which the film is based, but apparently changed when the former Miss Norma Jean was cast in the part). Her uncle, who is one of the elevator operators (played absolutely solidly by the great Elisha Cook Jr), has fixed Nell up with the job of babysitting a couple’s 7 or 8 year old girl while they go downstairs to an important party in the ground floor of the building (the father is played by Jim Backus, who many will know as the voice of the short sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo).

All well and good and all we know about Nell is that she desperately needs a job... but we will slowly begin to piece a lot more of her past together as we go through the movie. Her uncle promises to look in on Nell when he gets off his shift, to see she’s doing okay.

Meanwhile, Jed has given up on Lyn for a while. He goes back to his room, exchanging some more crisp dialogue with Elisha Cook Jr’s elevator operating character, Eddie, on the way up...

JED: “You’re lucky to have such a steady job.”
EDDIE: “Oh, it has its ups and downs sir.”

The film is noirish and Jed’s frustration is palpable as he paces his room, listening to Lyn’s voice on the live floorshow pumped in to the hotel room’s radio set. Then he glances out his window opposite a court in the middle of the hotel and sees Nell in the room across, wearing a sexy dress. He phones her and invites himself over to the room where she’s baby sitting. What he doesn’t know is that the dress and the ear rings and the watch that Nell is wearing belong to the couple who she is baby sitting for. With the kid tucked up in bed (or so she thinks), she starts to try the mother’s perfume and clothes on and eats the candy she so politely refused when offered earlier, in a greedy, gluttonous way which really starts to tell you that... yeah... their might be something a little wrong with our darling Nell.

After Jed has spent ten minutes with her, he begins to get a measure of her too, especially when the little girl comes out and gives the game away that this is not Nell’s apartment. Those tell-tale scars on the underside of Nell’s wrists where she’s tried to kill herself recently are not very reassuring either and, once the child nearly goes out of the window, but for the intervention of Jed... then he really begins to twig. Especially since Nell now mistakes him for her former husband, a pilot who died in an airline crash a few years before. After some shenanigans with busy body neighbours and Uncle Eddie, who Nell knocks cold, leaving him with a big gash in his forehead and... a little later... locked in a closet, Jed slips away to go downstairs and try to patch things up again with Lyn, once he’s made sure the kid is okay. He can see her silhouette sleeping in the dark as he slips out the door so she must be okay, right?

Nope. Another shocking moment in a movie which keeps building the suspense slowly is the revelation that, after all the noise the child has been making, Marilyn has hog-tied her on the bed. When Jed is telling Lyn about his evening and realises what he must have actually seen, in a moment of personal revelation that is similar to those experienced by lead actors in an early Italian giallo in terms of the way the mind plays tricks on one, he rushes up to the floor to find the child’s mother and Nell slugging it out in the girls room and all hell breaks loose.

The house detective arrives to take names and get to the bottom of the story and Nell takes this opportunity to escape, although she’s so out of it by now she doesn’t even realise it’s an opportunity. She grabs a razor blade and “wanders” off without anybody realising and makes her way to the lobby where she threatens to kill herself on account of all the attention she is getting. Then... oh, hang on, I don’t want to spoil everything. Let’s just say that Jed behaves in a manner that Lyn realises Jed has a part of him that he doesn’t show much... a part of him she’s been missing... and through Nell’s tragic tale, the two lovers start their relationship healing process.

This threadbare framework of the movie in no way tells you just how amazing the film is. The direction is quite throwaway in some respects, but the shot design is also be quite clever without making a fuss about it (including a nice conversation moment between Nell and Jed conducted through a shot in a mirror, in one sequence) and long steady shots are the order of the day. The artistry behind the camera is quite evident, even if the delivery is more pedestrian in it’s lack of vertiginous tracking shots and manipulative stylings. It’s a stark noirish milieu with sharp black and white photography and a sense of time ticking by at its own rate. The film is only 76 minutes long but never feels rushed at all or, considering the simplicity of the incidents depicted, in any way padded.

All the acting is top notch and solid, as you would expect from the cast on hand, with even the young Ann Bancroft turning in a fine performance in her first feature. The absolute icing on the cake, though, is Marilyn Monroe’s unbelievably worrying blend of her oft seen child-like naivete coupled with an intense darkness which she is able to let you see play across her features. Seriously, it’s like watching the cogs turning around in her brain, the facial expressions and tone with which she plays the piece is that good. If this was a brand new film this performance would be guaranteed to snag a best actress  oscar away from whoever this year’s hot contenders are. It’s absolutely stunning. The expression on her face when she starts getting her... “dark thoughts”... is absolutely chilling when seen in the context of the rest of her personality. I’m amazed Marilyn wasn’t given a lot more roles like this to do because the way she manages to play the tightrope delicacy of the part is absolutely exquisite. Anyone who thinks Monroe was just a brilliant comic actress or just an icon of female beauty (and she was both of those things too, of course) really needs to sit and watch this film. It won’t take up too much time and the intensity of her performance increasing as the running time wears on is absolutely brilliant.

So anyway, there it is. Don’t Bother To Knock. You can get this movie for a fiver or less at Amazon and if you haven’t seen this one, you really ought to. A classic piece of movie making, the style of which is all but forgotten these days and Hammer Horror enthusiasts might want to look at it to see what the director of such movies as Moon Zero Two (reviewed here), The Vampire Lovers (reviewed here), Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here) and certain other genre favourites was up to before working on those things.

Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen

Wild Eye For The Fumetti Guy

Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen
by Matt Blake with research by Julian Grainger
The Wild Eye Press 
ISBN: 978-0956997302

Well this is going to be a hard review as I am, it has to be said, feeling fairly ambivalent towards this book right now.

On the one hand, it’s “mission statement” seems a little unclear to me and, even though the author addressed this very issue in his introduction, I still felt myself wondering why loads of “costumed hero” movies had been left out of this book. Maybe it’s because the author seemed to be (mostly) limiting himself to movies taking their “inspiration” from Italian fumetti, in the proper Italian sense of the word (that’s comic strip to any non-Italian speakers) rather than international movies based or, in this case, inspired, from comic books but, even so, I’m sure there must have been more than 31 of these things made in Italy at the time. And if he is doing so, then why does he have a kind of “also ran” back up list of pocket reviews in a couple of pages at the end of the book which aren’t exclusively Italian.

On the other hand, there are really no other books around to cover these kinds of movies at present and until one does come along then Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen is pretty much the only game in town and is, therefore, an essential purchase in terms of having any coverage of this in your cinematic, reference book library. And it certainly doesn’t harm that the writer is actually quite engaging with his style of writing and manages to pack some interesting information into the reviews of the 31 films in question.

However, no matter how good this book is, I have enough minor criticisms of it in my mind that being able to completely recommend it seems somewhat hard... unless you are in possession of all the facts.

So one of the things is that it’s quite a slim volume, especially for the £12.99 retail price marked up on the back. To offset that comment, though, I will say that the point size on the type is quite small and double columned. Some may complain at the size of the point size being hard on the eyes (and I suspect one of those complaining would be me) but the upside of that is that there’s more textual content to the book than you might, at first realise. True it only covers 31 or so films but I would guess if the text was printed at a more readable size, there would have been a much larger number of pages to give the book a decent feel... and a lot less squinty eyes in the house.

An opinion, rather than a criticism, is that I did find the reviews, while always breezy and interesting, to be of a somewhat different opinion of the films covered to what I would have said. I bought this book to acquire a list of movies of this nature that I should be watching out for but, when I flicked through and saw how few films are covered, I realised that I already had a large chunk of these movies in my own DVD library... which is a bit of a shame. However, that means I can see the difference between my critical opinion of a film and the writer and researcher of this book and the chasm between our diagnosis of any particular film is sometimes a little wider than I would have liked. For example, I find the first of the two Superargo movies, Superargo Contro Diabolikus, to be far superior to the, admittedly, fun sequel. Blake prefers the second movie, Superargo And The Faceless Giants (reviewed here), and argues that to be the better film. Similarly, although I dearly love Mario Bava’s genre classic Danger: Diabolik, I don’t agree with Blake’s rave review of it.

The text makes for fascinating reading and gave me some interesting background knowledge that I didn’t already know... such as Danger: Diabolik actually perpetuating (along with the El Santo films I would guess) the movies made under this particular genre but, having such a troubled production history (various directors, writers and actors were involved with the film since the initial announcement), that it didn’t get out on release until many of the “bandwagon films” trying to capture it’s market were already out there by a long shot... a good two or three years. Also, the book cleared up for me the suspicion that not all (in fact, most by the looks of it) of these movies were based on actual fumetti, instead they were just meant to look like it. So a little light went off in my brain on that mini revelation.

Regrettably, the book is full of typos (probably not the writer’s fault but certainly the publishing company’s fault for letting it out the gate in this state) and, more worryingly, with the occasional basic factual inaccuracy which even a comparative novice to the genre such as myself could spot. For example, each film covered is preceded by a lengthy couple of paragraphs detailing the cast and crew, but in the case of the second of the Kriminal films, Il Marchio Di Kriminal, the musical composer is listed as Manuel Parada when it was actually scored by the wonderful Piero Umiliani. A similar mix up with composers is made on the first of the Kriminal films too and, although the exact same mistakes are made on the Internet Movie Data Base, it doesn’t excuse the fact that this is wrong (unless people were signing off on each others compositions for copyright purposes at the time, which wouldn’t be the first time this has happened*). The IMDB is a useful tool, but it’s not always right. I’m sure the two soundtrack CDs bearing the names of the correct composers wouldn’t have necessarily been allowed to be released as they are now with this oversight.

And in spite of all this, I’d still (at time of writing) list this book as an essential purchase. True, it has its problems, but it can’t have been that easy to get publishers interesting in producing a book of this subject matter (although the market is crying out for some tomes featuring really detailed analysis of these movies... such as the one Tim Lucas provides in his excellent book on Mario Bava, All The Colours Of The Dark). I think, if you know the pitfalls, then it’s a fine book to have to be able to pull our for a quick reference. If you’re one of those film fans who have never heard of the likes of Superargo, Argoman - The Fantastic Superman, The Three Supermen, Kriminal, Satanik, Diabolik and their ilk, then this book is definitely the best place to start, I would guess.

Either way, it’s worth picking up until something more extensive, featuring all the other vigilante heroes and villains of sixties and seventies cinema, such as Santo, Blue Demon, Judex and their kin, comes along.

* A recent conversation with an expert on Italian film music cleared this up for me and my deduction hinting at the political nature of cross-country productions is indeed correct, it would seem.

RED 2

Mirren Image

RED 2
2013 USA/France/Canada
Directed by Dean Parisot
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’ll be some slightly retired 
spoilers resurfacing here and coming up for action.

The original RED from two years ago is one of those movies that, at the time, pretty much charmed the pants off of everyone with it’s mixture of bullet spitting mayhem and senior citizens kicking all the fine young assassins’ and agents’ collective backsides all over the place. It’s the kind of film that begs a sequel but, since the movie really hit the mark and did mostly everything right, it's not necessarily something you want them to really produce, just in case they manage to screw it up the second time around.

Well, I’m here to tell you now... they didn’t screw it up.

In case you didn’t know, the acronym R.E.D stands for “Retired Extremely Dangerous” and it tells the story of a bunch of ex-government killing machines who are trying to enjoy their retirement (for the most part) but who find themselves accidentally embroiled in extremely sensitive, extremely dangerous missions... with the young “civilian” girlfriend of the character played by Bruce Willis tagging along and having a blast in the process. It’s based on a DC comic written by Warren Ellis, one of the better writers in the field, and this gives the first film, at least, a real sense of strong story mixed in with the action and the comedy.

I don’t know if RED 2 is actually based on any of the comics but, I have to say, that the second movie continues to add a lot of fun and, more importantly, heart warming moments in between the various fast-paced and, quite spectacular (if ludicrous in some cases... do people really just walk away from a helicopter crash?) action sequences and, I’m happy to say that most of the characters are back from the first film. Notable exceptions are Morgan Freeman (and if you’ve seen the first movie you’ll know why), Karl Urban (who was brilliant in the first one as the “bad guy’s killer pawn redeems himself” character) and, sadly, Ernest Borgnine. Now Ernest Borgnine is a real shame because I know he loved appearing in his brief role in the first movie and I remember reading an interview with him around the time of the first film’s release a couple of years ago where he said he really wanted to do another one and have a bigger part in it. Well, apparently, a slightly more prominent part was written for him for a scene in this second one but, alas, he died a few weeks before he came to shoot it. Which is a great pity... I’m sure he would have had a blast.

However, most the main actors from the first movie are all back. So the line up for this one is Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. Also along for the ride this time around are Catherine Zeta Jones, Anthony Hopkins (yeah, that’s right... this movie has two actors who have played Hannibal Lektor in it), David Thewlis (who is a sadly neglected genius of an actor) and Byung-hun Lee (who I’ve seen in a fair few Asian films over the last few years).

And guess what? It’s a cliché perhaps but, with a cast this good, it’s going to be hard to fail with this kind of ensemble unless the writing is really bad... and the writing is really quite good, for the most part, so you’re in good hands. Oh, okay, yeah... it has some cheap sci-fi inventions made up just to annhilate certain plot weaknesses (hello, I’m looking at you “red mercury”) but what film doesn’t these days. And it doesn’t matter too much because this film is one where, yes the action sequences are typical modern Hollywood spectacle... but the plot and dialogue which glue these little set pieces together are just as inspired and fun to watch and it feels like an appropriate mix, for the most part.

There’s a kind of twist which, I suspect, most people will see coming (even from the trailer and casting if they think things through) but it doesn’t really matter because, as well as being about a team of not-so-past-it wrinklies kicking ass, it’s also got the brilliant chemistry between Willis, Parker and Malkovich which helped make the first film such a blast. And of course, everyone is getting in on the act of advising Willis on his love life and how to not be so controlling with his girlfriend etc... it’s really humorous stuff. Oh and, yeah, it has the big thing which made the first movie such compulsive viewing...

Helen Mirren firing off machine guns.

All kinds of guns and weapons of lethal destruction, in fact, in what amounts to a slight expansion of her role and importance in the film compared to the first, I think. Which means, of course, you have a few moments where the relationship between Mirren and Brian Cox is, well, hilarious (He likes the way her toes curl up just before she pulls the trigger when she’s on sniper duty, it would seem). Unfortunately, my one criticism of the first movie (as reviewed here), still stands in this one. We want to see a “naked” Helen Mirren shooting off her machine guns... oh well... maybe they’ll do that for the third one which, I understand, has just been assigned writers.

The film does try to repeat, somewhat, the formula of the first film, it’s true... there’s even a “character realises he’s wrong and decides to help the team instead of killing them” moment again from one of the ensemble cast... you’ll probably see that one coming way before it happens too, I suspect. But it really doesn’t matter too much because the formula of the first movie was just perfect and this one really doesn’t drop the ball with it either.

It’s one up on a few fair modern action films too, in that the editing is pretty good and you won’t suddenly find yourself getting lost in the action like you might have in... um... I dunno... Pacific Rim maybe (reviewed here), as an example. This is good and the action and humour/drama of the thing is ably supported with a strong score by Alan Silvestri, who I find a bit hit an miss but he does a terrific job here. It also continues the inventive “comic book” location transitions from the first movie... and this movie does a lot of globe hopping I can tell you. Sometimes back to the same countries (which makes shooting these things out of sequence a good way to save money and add value by changing locales at frequent intervals) but that’s okay... it all serves the story and these transitions are funky.

And that’s my short review of RED 2 done, I believe. If you liked the first one and want to see a sequel which, remarkably, wont sour the sweet taste of the original (as so many of them can) then go see this movie. And if you haven’t seen the first one... well, having the background of the first one is better but you can pretty much gather the relationships between the characters as it goes along... and besides, it has Helen Mirren causing mass destruction... so go see it anyway!

Frances Ha

Ha-binger

Frances Ha
2012 USA
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Potential spoilers, depending on how you look at things.

Okay, so I don’t know why we got Noah Baumbach’s latest movie so far behind the USA release but, whatever, at least it got here. One of the things I heard about this movie was that it has no story. Now, I’m cool with movies with no story, plot or any kind of coherent structure. I honestly don’t think those are necessary components of cinema at all... no matter how many directors insist on saying it is.

On the other hand... Frances Ha is not that kind of movie.

I don’t know what other people were watching but it certainly has a certain amount of story content... it’s just that it’s a small story and is more like an arc of progressive spiralling down than anything else, told through conversation rather than incident. Kind of like a building of an impression of life like Koyaanisqatsi, but with conversations shot in gorgeous black and white replacing the speeding imagery and Philip Glass score.

And I’m also fine with that... although I have to admit I was quite looking forward to seeing a movie without a story again. Haven’t seen one of those for a while.

The film is cleanly framed and most of the shots seem to be absolutely static. Like a series of master shots strung together and used as they are... which is as good and stunningly beautiful a valid technique as you’re going to get. The film, because of the black and white photography I suspect, has been compared to the works of Woody Allen... but this is really not much like Allen’s oeuvre except for, perhaps, locale. In fact, if I was going to compare the style of the movie to anyone, I think I’d be looking more in the direction of Mr. Whit Stillman than Mr. Allen, although either way, to be honest, should be taken as a compliment.

The dialogue, co-written by the lead actress Greta Gerwig, is charming and portrays the titular (kinda) role as a person who is perhaps at odds with the real world. Gerwig plays her as a totally upbeat and uplifting spirit who refuses to let life’s little (big) problems get in the way of her general cheerfulness. A bit like the character Poppy, played by Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky (reviewed here), but with a little less of the in-your-face quality to it.

This being said... I’m sure a lot of people must have bought in to her as a character without realising the not too subtle difference between the way she acts and the way she is. Her situation is mostly a kind of dead end and a terminal one at that, throughout the majority of the movie and I find the “poster quotes” that the movie is uplifting to be mostly false. Sure, I can see that her easy going personality could be seen on its own as fairly uplifting... I’ve pretty much said so above. But the fact that her character seems, most of the time, doomed to misunderstand the social and economical milieu in which she finds herself, in addition to being a person who will go the extra mile for someone... only to find her loyalty not really reciprocated as she expected, makes her more of a sad character.

I loved the film, and Gerwig in particular, but all the way through I kept thinking of her a little like the title character in my favourite Fellini movie, Nights Of Cabiria... but without the added insight of the notoriously once cut “man with the sack” scene.

To clarify, in Nights Of Cabiria (reviewed here), the prostitute Cabiria follows around a kind benefactor one night, the “man with a sack”, as he charitably gives food to various poor people who find themselves at life’s ragged end. Cabiria sees well known people from her past who were big shots in her trade who have drifted from memory and ended up on the scrap heap, thus enabling her to see her life as her future is likely to be and try to make plans accordingly... only to find her destiny inevitable (which is another story).

I felt this way about Frances Ha who, when things don’t go the way she plans, tends to mostly not be flexible enough to adapt to her current situation straight away and instead, finds her situation getting worse and worse. Although it might be seen that her plight isn’t the same as the Cabiria role made famous by Giulietta Masina, the stakes seem to me to be exactly the same as the former character in many respects, as they are for us all. We all need a roof over our head and a basic job to keep some money coming in. What Frances Ha doesn’t have, is a character like the “man with a sack” who can help give her the insight into where her life is going at a time when she can do more about it.

Unlike Fellini’s opus, Baumbach’s Frances Ha at least gives the title character a certain amount of hope in the mix and the last sequence, where she sacrifices her dreams to take the job and then create her own opportunities, is something of a reprieve and a chance to take stock for the character. At least that’s the way I saw it.

Frances Ha, and the title sums up the character really well if you say it out aloud*, is a witty, insightful and charming movie. Hypnotic, entertaining and, certainly, very funny. It also, I have to say, put me on a bit of a downer for the rest of the day. The fact that some of the characters in this film are ultimately missing out little pieces of themselves and mostly falling towards their fates or, in some cases, being dragged towards them, was less than uplifting to me, in all honesty. But that’s actually not a criticism (it’s as valid an emotion to prod with the sharp end of a cinemaic stick as anything else) and I found a lot to laugh at too. There are some genuinely clever one liners throughout the running time of the movie. It’s light and fluffy in places but using that frothy top to hide the emotional weight it harbours underneath. I’ll certainly be watching this one again and I think it’s a good night out at the movies. I also think it’s the best film yet that I’ve seen this particular person direct. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it too.

*Actually, when I asked the lady at the box office for a ticket, I asked loudly for a ticket to Frances HAAAAAAAH! Warning... some people get perplexed by even the slightest deviation from the accepted norm, it would seem.

The Conjuring

Conjurlingus

The Conjuring
2013 USA
Directed by James Wan
Playing at cinemas now.

Hmmm.

You know, back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to claim that there were only, maybe, between five and ten decent horror movies ever made. Now, what I meant by that is actually, between five and ten “scary” horror movies ever made. Clearly, for example, The Bride Of Frankenstein is probably going to be on most people’s top ten horror movies but it’s probably not in any way an effective horror movie in terms of scaring anyone... unless that person is two or three years old maybe. So for when I was making that claim... I stick to my guns. There are lots of great horror films, such as Suspiria, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Night Of The Living Dead etc... but none of these movies are in any way scary.

Nowadays, however, I’d have to say my opinion has been forced to change given the influx of really well made horror films coming out in the last ten to fifteen years. Loads of films where the creeping and subtle terror, has started to make a come back in a more than competent manner. We have films that get the job done right, now, like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, The Last Exorcism (reviewed here), Paranormal Activity 2 (reviewed here) and Paranormal Activity 3 (reviewed here) and, you know, The Blair Witch Project. Even just the last couple of years there’s been a steady increase of freshly made horrors which actually don’t fail to scare and I can probably add a lot to the likes of my original list from way back when... which included stuff like The Haunting (1963 version), The Fog (1980 version), The Shining and, tentatively, The Exorcist (The Version We’ve Already Seen). I think it’s fair to say that during the last decade or two, my list has probably doubled.

The reason I’m dredging up this stuff now is actually by way of an apology. You see, The Conjuring is actually something of a great and powerfully scary movie. That being said, though, I’ve reviewed a fair few effectively scary new movies over the past three years and so, if what I say here about this movie sounds like something of a bit of a repeat review of any of the other of the better horror movies I’ve reviewed on this blog, well I apologise.

Of course, that makes this review no less valid and the movie in question no less great.

The films is a dramatisation of the real life events of a demonic possession which plagued the Perron family back in the early seventies and the people who helped them, the real life husband and wife team of psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (portrayed brilliantly in this movie by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who, among others, investigated one case which is known to modern cinema audiences as The Amityville Horror. It’s also a very effective “scare the pants off you” movie which is not to be missed by fans of the supernatural and the unknown.

Three things distinguish this movie a little more than a lot of the other horror movies doing the rounds the past few years... the first being, of course, that we have a real life couple of protagonists who have investigated hundreds of cases which could be prepped for a sequel if this movie is successful (they are and it is, by the way... I’m expecting to see another one in a couple of years and I look forward to it greatly). So genre characters who can keep on running in a number of movies, thus filling a void left when the two movies made as extensions of the TV show The X Files turned out to be... well... a bit lame.

Another thing which make this a little different is that it’s set in a period around about 1971 (until 1973 in real life, is my understanding of events) and although there are a lot of accidental anachronisms on show for the time portrayed here, the movie generally manages to capture the spirit of this period without resorting to too much postmodernistic nostalgia... it’s not a movie about the past, in other words, it is just set in the past and this is not a ‘feature’ of the story... it is just another fact.

The other element which sets it apart is its confidence in breaking the narrative flow to put in little diversions and emphasise points with a bit of visual punctuation, so to speak, not unlike a 1960s Godard movie... although with a completely different motive. It’s also to the credit of the director in question that this never really breaks the spell of the film... merely serves to enhance little points at key moments. Also, it’s not done all over the place either. It’s a tool which is used on the odd occasion and which doesn’t outstay its welcome.

A couple of “mini past cases” from  The Warrens are highlighted, for example, one of which... involving the much loved horror film staple of “a creepy doll”... is even used to clarify certain events pertaining to the case The Warrens are working on in the main timeline of the movie in no uncertain terms (you’ll know it when you see it... Ed and Lorraine Warren are not the only people besides their assistants and The Perron Family who are placed in demonic peril... but I really don’t want to spoil it for you so I’ll say nothing of this here).

And now we come to the stuff which is possibly going to sound a bit like one or two of my other reviews... but I write this because it’s the truth. The film-makers obviously know horror movies inside out and, though I had my reservations about the last 20 minutes or so of this director’s Insidious (which turned me off that whole movie, to a certain extent), this guy certainly knows how to run almost every horror cliché in the book throughout the film’s, never overlong, running time and still get away with it. That is to say, he has honed his feel for horror cinema to the point where, even though you are expecting quite a lot of what goes down in some of the key scare sequences, they are always so beautifully and effectively executed that you really can’t find fault with them. Indeed, you don’t have time to find fault because the sequences in question, coming ready or not, will make you jump out of your skin at some points. So if you are already a jumpy person... consider yourself warned.

Also, the director is not one of these people who is inclined to keep the camera moving all over the place at high speed to make it look like it’s moving along at breakneck place but, that being said, he does tend to have a very slow shifting field of vision which gives the feeling of static master shots when, in fact, they didn’t seem to be. Very slow takes and edits seems to be the order of the day here (thank goodness) and the slight sense of motion inherent in every 24 frames of film is really hypnotic and helps to draw you into that all important atmosphere of terror the crew is trying hard to create here.

And it works really well. Right down to Joseph Bishara’s original score which really supports the film well and which I have to wait a month to arrive on CD because, for some reason I can’t fathom, it’s only available from US Amazon and not the UK Amazon. Go figure. So I can’t tell you as yet what it’s like as a stand alone listen but it’s really effective in the movie and I’m sure it will scare me loads when I finally get around to listening to it. Certainly goes for a mood of terror and unease and gets it right all the way.

The one thing this movie really has going for it though, right throughout the entire movie, is that all the human characters (and by that I mean, people who aren’t dead and are ghostly or demonic spirits) are completely likeable characters who you really wouldn’t mind hanging around with at a pub and who really promote a certain, solid set of loving family values. And of course, this makes the spiritual and deadly attacks on them even more frightening. You care about all of these characters... so you’re invested in them right from the outset.

And of course, the actors portraying all of these people are just great in their roles. There’s honestly not a bad turn among them. These are skilled craftsmen and craftswomen who, along with the rest of the crew, have come together to make a horror movie which will literally, for want of a more eloquent term, “scare you up good”. And it’s to their credit that, in The Conjuring, they do just that. If you call yourself a fan of horror cinema then, although it might all seem a little overfamiliar perhaps, you really ought to go and see this movie and have some kind of opinion of it... good or bad. I had a lot of fun with this one... and so did the packed out audience I saw it with, if the jumps and screams are anything to go by.